In manufacturing processes, such as circuit board manufacturing, it is often desirable to determine conditions at various stages of the process. This may be helpful in determining whether a particular manufacturing stage is operating under optimal conditions or whether it is operating close to failure conditions. Conventional manufacturing methods tend to rely on human interaction or monitoring to gauge the condition of particular manufacturing stages. This is inconvenient, time consuming, and costly in terms of resources. Other methods may employ automated monitoring techniques, such as sensors, to measure some conditions at a manufacturing stage. However, these sensors typically do not provide information about each product (e.g., circuit board) processed at a particular manufacturing stage and/or how well the particular process was applied to each product.
Additionally, determining whether a product failure was due to manufacturing defect, component failure, or improper use is important in many cases. For instance, whether a circuit board failure was caused by improper use or product defect may determine whether the failure was an isolated incident or whether all circuit boards in the same batch are susceptible to such failure and, therefore, should be recalled or returned. Currently, it is difficult and time consuming to determine whether a whole batch of circuit boards are susceptible to defects.
One problem in tracking the manufacturing conditions of particular circuit boards across various manufacturing stages is how to individually identify each circuit board. Because circuit boards are exposed to various chemicals and mechanical processes during manufacturing, it is impractical to print a number, barcode, or other identifier on the surface of each circuit board. That is, the chemicals and/or mechanical processes tend to remove or damage such identifiers on the circuit boards.
An additional problem exists in tracking circuit boards beyond the manufacturing stages. For instance, it may be advantageous to continue to track the circuit boards (and even products that incorporate said circuit boards) during a subsequent assembly, warehousing, and distribution stage.
Thus, a system and/or method are needed to accurately track circuit boards at various manufacturing, assembly, inventory control, and/or distribution stages.